The Gas Pipe was a 63-metre long yellow gas pipe installation inspired by the current political tensions surrounding Gazprom’s initiative Nord Stream. As the Gas Pipe installation was commissioned for the Estonian exposition at the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2008, the object was progressing from Russian pavilion to German pavilion in Giardini, passing a number of other countries’ pavilions. Thus, the Gas Pipe visualised the current issues in international politics in relation to aesthetics of landscape in international free market economy.

A great number of international architecture publications and newspapers covering the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture named the Gas Pipe to be one of the highlights of the year. In addition, it was awarded with two main awards of Cultural Endowment of Estonia in 2008. The actual Nord Stream from Vyborg, Russia to Greifswald, Germany was inaugurated in 2012 and is planned to have a double by 2019.

The initial project of Nord Stream to build a pipeline into the Baltic Sea was widely contested from ecological as well as geopolitical positions. While others advocated to build a mainland gas pipe. Therefore, Salto’s elevated a real scale gas pipe along one of the main pedestrian avenues in Giardini to demonstrate the material existence of the polemical issue in question.

Along with the general outline of the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture curated by Aaron Betsky, the Gas Pipe was not meant to posit solutions but would pose and frame problems concerning mechanisms that determine the contemporary physical and architectural space.

On the one hand, the Gas Pipe addressed the reality of contemporary landscape that is increasingly defined by large-scale infrastructures and intermingling of the technological and the natural. On the other hand, it highlighted the spatial dimension of energy business of our time. Doing so, it raised the questions of architect’s role in relation to power as well as the potential of critical architecture as such.

Giardini plan with the Gas Pipe

“Gaasitoru/Gas Pipe puts in broad day light one of the most pressing factors that will determine how the architecture of the 21st century will not develop in quest of beauty but of energy.”

25.X.2008 in We Make Money Not Art

The installation invited us to come up with numerous interpretations by unexpectedly confronting the viewer as a tangible, inescapable and massive real thing that it turned out to be later.